Mid-August flotsam

Reached mid-semester point, with quite a few new lectures to prepare. Nothing extremely complicated but, as always, the tricky part is finding a way to make it meaningful and memorable. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, I sound like a broken record but I’m a bit obsessive about helping people to ‘get’ a topic.

I gave knitr a go while preparing model answers for an assignment. I liked the integration with RStudio and the possibility of using several markup languages. For simple documents Markdown + R is an excellent combination to generate HTML output. However, I wanted to generate PDF output with some math, so I went for latex integration. Jeromy Anglim’s site provides a very good starting point for using knitr to document reproducible analyses.